xfolk-brainstorming

xFolk Brainstorming

xFolk is a bare bones microformat for describing and tagging things represented by a URL. This definition, although simple, is pretty broad. xFolk brainstorming is a set of fairly free-flowing ideas about the future directions of xFolk. Are there functional issues you feel xFolk should address? Other issues or ideas? Do you have implementation ideas you would like to discuss? Put them here.

Authors

Functional Extensions

We will be adding the ability to tag any visible element that has an href attribute. This includes <img> and <object> elements. It is likely that there will be more specialized, domain-specific microformats for some of these items in the future.

Attribute Value Naming

Should we change the name of taggedlink, used to represent the item to be tagged to a more neutral name such as tagged or taggedresource?

The editor's current thinking is that taggedlink represents well the fact that people are identifying things represented by a URL. However, as some discussants have pointed out, the name may be too narrow. The editor is waiting to collect further data and use cases.

Here is one use case recently presented by Eran on the discussion list:

For simplicity let's assume I'm using xFolk for my photo tagging service. Following the microformat philosophy, I would like to present the information in a way that's meaningful both to people and machines. For a machine, a URL is enough to identify a a resource so something like the following is enough:

Deprecate xFolk

We should deprecate xFolk in favour of hReview. Having two such similar microformats seems pointless. xFolk emerged more or less as a fully formed idea from a single contributor over a two day wiki-editing spree; hReview has more evidence of having followed a sensible, iterative design process with multiple contributors. Any xFolk entry can be re-expressed in hReview pretty trivially: